UPDATED: Avon Lake driver pleads guilty in 2019 hit-and-run injury crash

ELYRIA — An Avon Lake woman who struck and seriously injured a cyclist with her car more than two years ago pleaded guilty this week to four criminal charges in Lorain County Common Pleas Court. Allison Spoerl, 23, entered a guilty plea to felony charges of failure to stop after an accident and tampering with evidence, both felonies, and misdemeanor charges of negligent assault and falsification. A charge of aggravated vehicular assault, a felony, was amended to misdemeanor negligent assault by the Lorain County Prosecutor's Office at the time of the plea. Following a presentence investigation by the Lorain County Adult Probation Department, her sentencing is scheduled for 10 a.m. Nov. 1 in Judge John Miraldi's courtroom. A trial had been scheduled to start next week, according to court records. Spoerl was charged with hitting and seriously injuring 51-year-old Patricia "Patty" Banks of Bay Village, during a hit-and-run traffic crash on May 15, 2019. Avon Lake police said Spoerl's 2017 Ford Focus hit Banks and her bicycle just after 4 p.m. that day as Banks rode east on the south side of Lake Road. Spoerl did not stop and fled south on Moore Road. Marcia Herwaldt of Avon Lake, who has nursing and EMT training, stopped and rendered aid to banks, stopping the bleeding from her severed carotid artery. Banks was later flown to Metro Health Medical Center in Cleveland for treatment. After releasing photos of the car to the public, Avon Lake police found it at an Avon body shop the following day with a shattered windshield and dents in the hood and roof. Spoerl was identified as the driver and charged. Patty Banks and her son David filed a lawsuit against Spoerl and her father, James, in May, seeking more than $25,000 in damages for physical harm and "loss of parental consortium." The lawsuit is assigned to Ewers' court. Prosecutors said Allison Spoerl lied to her insurance company about how the crash happened. The Bankses lawsuit claims that Allison Spoerl told people after the crash that "she believed she had hit a trash can." Along with the severed carotid artery, severe neck and facial cuts, Patty Banks also had bleeding in her brain, two punctured lungs, pelvic fractures, a severe cut on her arm that left scars, damage to her right patellar tendon that required surgery and physical therapy, blood loss anemia and an injury to her left facial nerve, according to her lawsuit. Lieux argued that his client had the right of way at the time of the crash. Lieux hired Introtech, a Grafton firm, to generate a crash reconstruction report for his client's defense in late 2019. Reconstructionists there concluded that Spoerl's car was making a left turn to head south on Moore Road when Banks rode her bicycle straight through the intersection after leaving the dedicated right-turn only lane. Patty Banks "was traveling to the far left side of the dedicated right-turn lane, rather than the requirement to cycle as far to the right-hand side of the roadway," the report concluded. That meant, Lieux argued at the time, that Patty Banks was not in the proper lane and rode straight in a turn-only lane. "Had she been in straight-through lane, she would have been fine. She would have had the right of way. But she went straight through. She had to yield, she failed to yield," he told the Chronicle-Telegram in November 12019. "As a bicyclist she had to adhere to the same rules as a car would." Spoerl was in the left turn-only lane, as she was supposed to be, to make the left onto Moore Road. She was not reckless, did not fail to yield to Patty Banks and her bicycle and arguably had the right of way at the time of the collision, Lieux said. "The injuries are tragic, as is Allison's youthful, panicked decision to leave the scene, and try and hide it from her parents," he said. In reply to the defense statements, Patty Banks told The Chronicle that she was traveling in the bike lane at the time of the crash. Contact Dave O'Brien at (440) 329-7129 or dobrien@chroniclet.com. Follow him at @daveobrienCT on Twitter.